SEO is not just about your site's homepage. For better or for worse, it's about every page of your site. Every individual page stands on its own merits and can fly or die based on its unique interaction and relationship with other internal and external pages, it's content and it's structure. It's this fact that makes full site search engine optimisation (SEO) such a potentially rewarding marketing option. You're not limited to a narrow range of keywords or keyword phrases; you can sculpt and mould content to meet your specific business objectives, attracting and guiding traffic while all the time using your strongest pages to power the rest. Approaching SEO as a site-wide, page-by-page discipline will, if applied intelligently with planning and insight, yield successful and long lasting benefits.
If your SEO has been conducted professionally, not just your home page but every page on your site is a potential landing page. Each page on your site has the opportunity to make a positive first impression, to provide content or information of interest and to lead visitors to a call to action. Don't spoil your home page, giving it all your SEO attention at the expense of the rest of your site. Every page on your site is potentially a home page, with holistic SEO techniques used to drive traffic and deliver business rewards.
Home Page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) vs Full Site Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? It's not a simple question of either or. It's a question of both.
Many SEO professionals consider there to be three main pillars of SEO - Structure, Content, and Links. They're all interrelated, with effective SEO the product of great content applied across a well-structured site attracting authoritative inbound links. Of those pillars the structure of a website is often one of the most under rated aspects of SEO, not just with website owners but also by experienced search engine optimisation companies and consultants. Website structure consists of several intertwined elements including coding, internal links and the nature of technology applied to the site build. Failure to structure a site professionally will completely undermine site-wide SEO. You may end up with individually successful pages but will miss out on the internally generated authority evolution.
HTML has evolved. Modern versions such as CSS 1.0 and XHMTL offer clean, semantic and search engine friendly solutions. Light, tight, clean coding.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enable developers to remove redundant design code from a website and place the content closer to the start of the document, whilst at the same time reducing the code to mark-up ratio. CSS also facilitates easier, more cost-effective site maintenance by separating content from style.
The conversion of a website from table based to pure CSS based design will decrease the amount of code by somewhere in the region of 40%. All the major search engines appreciate streamlined code, especially Google, with many of the best ranked SEO companies themselves applying CSS based deigns.
Search engines care immensely how web masters categorize and label their own content - Internal Site Navigation. It's recommended that every website have a user accessible XML Sitemap linked from every page then submit it to Google sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer, not only to assist user navigation but to generate internal link juice. The more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will accrue. Some SEO specialists report that one relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links.
Most sites with indexing problems are suffering from an inefficient internal page linking structure, with the biggest issues relating to JavaScript and CSS navigation systems that the search engines struggle to crawl.
Create a Robots.txt file that defines your sitemap and lists exclusions. Though the robot.txt file does have uses when used to prevent unnecessary or duplicate information being indexed, failing to manage the it properly by listing exclusions will cause spidering problems as it might inform the search engine's content fetching robots that they may not fetch that particular page.
By sculpting PageRank Flow using the no-follow tag you can cap off the flow of PageRank to pages considered unimportant from a search point of view. For example, though a Privacy policy page may be useful to customers, there's probably little point in it being picked up by the search engines. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you increase the relative importance of other more important pages such as those relating to products or product categories.
The engines are not at all keen on dynamic or session-based URLs and URLs with more than one or two variable parameters. This can create duplication problems or inconsistent indexing. By far the best approach is to apply static URLS or mask your dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL.
A lot of dynamic websites present the same content on multiple pages. An example of this is the 'view a printer-friendly version of this page' option offered. A better web solution would be to develop a printer-friendly Cascading Stylesheet.
It's always good policy to purge any unnecessary URLs from the site. Create static pages by applying forms that allow the posting data to reduce page count. Multiple URLs can confuse spiders to the degree that they don't index the catalog properly and some of the main content pages are not cached.
Ideally all individual pages should benefit from the complete range of 'on-page' SEO that is normally applied to the Home page. Title tags, H1 tags, high quality keyword rich content, alt tags, and even meta tags should be optimised before moving onto organising external links. Since 'off-page' factors are more difficult to directly influence, many experts are of the opinion that on-page and site-wide SEO tactics will become increasingly important.
At SEO Consult we apply expert site-wide SEO techniques. Not only do our developers pay close attention to client home pages, but also work across the whole site generating authority, driving traffic and fulfilling business objectives.
